By John Gideon on 1/23/2008, 8:00pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today is a mixed bag of articles. Officials in South Carolina have been told to have the proper amount of emergency paper ballots at the polls for the Democratic primary election this Saturday. It seems that Republicans were forced to vote on any scrap of paper available in Horry Co last Saturday.

The Registrar of Voters of Sacramento Co California, Jill Lavine, has revealed that the county's ES&S M-100 precinct-based optical-scan machines failed “Logic and Accuracy” testing for the Feb 5 primary:

Many of the county's M100 machines, which have been tested and used for several previous elections without incident, had a variety of problems. With some machines, the ballot could not be loaded at all, or only accepted if loaded in backwards. In some cases, Democratic votes were not being recorded by a scanner. With other machines, it would be Republican votes that were not recorded. And with some machines, there were no problems at all. With the election within two weeks, Lavine decided to fore go using the scanners altogether, and count the ballots centrally at the county election office.

We applaud Lavine and her staff for doing a thorough L&A test and for making the correct decision. One can only wonder as to whom ES&S will blame for this problem.

Meanwhile Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman has changed his mind again and he is now backing the state’s county clerks association which wants vote-by-mail. The governor and legislative leaders today announced legislation that will require all counties to keep poll site voting but do away with the state’s DREs and require paper ballots. It cannot be long before Coffman changes his mind again and announces his support for paper ballots at the polls.

Those stories, and all the other notable voting news today, linked below as usual...

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

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